


Ice Wine

by Unovis



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Dreams, Food, M/M, Wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:21:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unovis/pseuds/Unovis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the apple season, in the time of grapes, in the honey harvest, he supposed they were happiest.<br/>Methos dreams in the Adirondacks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice Wine

In the apple season, in the time of grapes, in the honey harvest, he supposed they were happiest. Busy, in the golden afternoons that went to blue and ash so quickly; sticky and fragrant with their work, warm in the sun and chilled in the evening before first frost. He basked in the memory. Autumn work and autumn earth with his old companion, his ancient love.

Methos yawned and shifted to catch a patch of sun. To catch a different view. To his assessing eye, Duncan had nothing of the farmer, the gardener, the tender of the soil about him. He built. He cooked, he assembled. A brewer? Cocking his head and considering, Methos didn't see before him a riser of yeast.

“What?”

“Missed a bit there. Top of the brushy streaks.”

“Top of your patch?”

“I don't leave streaks.”

“It looks like a badger's tail. Grab a brush; you found it, you fix it.”

“I'm smooth as milk. My hand was sure, my eye was clear. And my nose...”

“A wonder you could see the post at all. Get up.”

“My nose is safer here. Once painted, twice shy.” A baker worked yeast, but killed it quickly. Quicker than the bees lost their lives. Beekeeping, one could argue, was a martial pursuit. Did Duncan, he wondered, have a mind bloody enough for that occupation? But bee work was milder now, he reminded himself. As was war.

“That was fifteen years ago. Your mother mated with an elephant. Which would explain...”

“So many aspects of soul, and mind, and body. I'm flattered you've noticed.” Duncan reddened in response, with suppressed laughter or annoyance. Cheeks like apples, like last month's leaves, like Bacchus. A brown eyed Bacchus, brown warrior, yes. A vintner? “Fifteen years ago October. It’s November now.”

“December, actually. You remember that year, but not this week?”

Duncan in March; Kristen in October; Alexa, November. He recalled that year. “In the Julian calendar, it’s November still. I was thinking Roman thoughts.” _Agricola, agricolae, agricolarum. In vino veritas._ “Where are we?”

“Lazy, ignorant, and querulous: When, where, who?”

“Wheat, vines, wine.”

“You work and I’ll talk, for a change. Here.” Duncan swiped a brush in Methos’s direction, spattering red-brown drops on the tarp. Not white, this time. This time it was December, as he’d been told, which was a shame. Autumn color had a prime, and they’d passed it. The winters were warmer, the grapes in the arbor only lately cased in ice. Like plums in sugar-candy he’d seen once at Versailles, at a party where the trees offered confections for the plucking, in mock snow and ice. Not grown, but built, and fetchingly false. 

“Methos! Wake up!” 

The year had been established. The when…along the road. The where, upstate New York, up mountains, up Hudson, up beauty; a rustic robber baron’s retreat, a nineteenth-century fantasy in wood and horn and hide that had somehow caught the Highlander’s fancy. Or was a legacy from Connor. It was something to do, refurbishing this solid old frame. It was far enough away, still, from the urban human herd. It was accessible to Methos, which was all he cared about.

“Methos, where are you?”

In the arms of Adirondack, far, far from Rome. Far from Paris, from the Old World. Far from Seacouver with its sad memories. Better this lodge. Better this company. Better this year. Better, always, the now.

The sun through glass warmed the solarium, the worn, overstuffed canvas cushions on the rustic couch, his arm and hip and thighs. This perfect spot. If he closed his eyes in the ruddy light, he could still see Duncan. He could feel the heat and Duncan. See Duncan. See Duncan work; nothing nicer than lying idle in a pool of sun, watching Duncan work.

“Methos, wake up.”

He was awake. How Darius would have loved this place. How Methos would have loved showing it to him. How Byron rhapsodized, when he first encountered this mountain chain. He found the fur trappers more intriguing than Hudson sunsets, but the thunderstorms transported him. Now, there was another non-farmer. He shrugged away Byron for more mellow pleasures. Darius singing psalms, out of tune. Duncan in a hunter's shirt and jeans, waxing golden oak. Darius in his hunter's cassock. Duncan waxing psalms. Waxing palms.

"Wake up." Darius rapped the sole of his foot with the shovel.

+++

"Wake..."

"Up, I am, I'm..." The second rap stung. Methos rolled away from it, rolled away and off his couch, onto the ground, squinting and coughing in dirt. He rubbed his eyes.

"Thou sloth."

"Thou shrew." Methos blinked. The sun was in his eyes, or something bright. The walls were gone, the broad planks of the floor had turned to earth and leaves, the couch to a grassy hump. There was a basket holding shears. There was a nip in the air. There were the mountains, still blue and greeny gray in the distance. There was Darius, in his coarse brown smock and apron, feet wrapped in wool, in wooden clogs, solid and smelling of bark.

"Thou catalogue of sins. Asleep, with an empty basket. What bad bargain, what trying God brought you into my vineyard?"

"The God of open hands, of love for all things resting in His warming sun, the God who would save me from a nagging wife." He twitched his knee away from the shovel's swing. His knee inside gray homespun breeches, doubled thickness on the knees, patched and singed and familiarly stained: he knew them. He knew this shirt, under a felted tunic. It scratched between his shoulders. He knew this argument. He caught the shovel shaft in his hand. "I but closed my eyes."

"Snoring like a dog. Take up your basket, raise your idle bones, and get to work."

The glare in his eyes was the sun, cresting the mountains. His vision was dazzled by his own rising breath. His rump was numbing on the frosted dirt. "It's cold," he complained. His ankles were bare, his feet bare in backless clogs. His fingers, he noted, indignantly, were red at the joints. He touched his nose. And _cold._  
  
The shovel arced back, and Methos scrambled to his knees. He stood, creaking, and shook the hem of his shirt. "This is not Paradise," he grumbled. Darius snorted and turned away.

"Eden enough," Methos heard him say. Darius walked on and Methos followed, crunching up a bare path between a stand of saplings, between a row of low, dead berry brambles that scratched his heels. "Where are my socks? I had socks."

"Drunk, lost, gambled away. You'd offer your cock for a mug of beer."

 _I wouldn't._ His clog rocked over a root across the path. His mouth twisted. _I would._  
  
"Rather starve on a penny than work for a pound."

"Darius?" Mist had gathered in the hollows of the tree-covered mountains. On peaks, in clefts, he saw white. The air was clear and sharp, though the sky looked like whey. It was far too cold, too late-seeming in the year to harvest anything. Had Darius said vineyard? Too early to prune vines, he sincerely hoped.

He had said vineyard. They turned to the left, and before them up a gentle slope ranged rows of vines on trellises. Beyond them, between birches and fir trees, glinted a broad stretch of blue lake. "Darius, where..."

"Over here, over here; the last row. Mind your elbows."

It was _cold._ Near freezing now, if his nose was any guide. With every step, they seemed to retreat further from warmth, from burnished autumn, from the sun rising at his back. Darius in front of him was pitiless, unaffected, walking with his long, swinging gait down the aisle between the vines. Now there was snow on the tops of the vines, heaped on the leaves. There was snow underfoot. Methos's eyes were smarting when Darius stopped.

"Here." _Here_ was a row of unharvested vines, heavy with bunches of blushing white grapes. The snow crusted _here_ on the grapes as well, grapes that were frosted with ice. Methos stretched a finger, a cold, twig-like finger, to touch one of the rimed globules, and Darius barked. "No touching! No hands, no breath on them, so hold your rattling tongue. Use the shears." His basket, like Darius's now, was lined with frozen grape leaves and snow.

He watched, silently, as Darius snipped a bunch. Holding it by the stem, he laid it in the basket. Again. And again. 

Simple work. Simple, painful work with frozen fingers; but warmer to work than to watch. Methos snipped grapes and watched Darius. His fingers, firm with purpose, gentle with intent. His mien unyielding, his neck rigid. His mouth turned down.

"Are you happy?" asked Methos, face away from the vines. "Is this sainthood, at last? Harvesting God's frozen grapes? Or Lucifer's? I'd think the Devil would set you warmer work."

"All grapes are the gods'," said Darius. "And the Devil works beside me."

"I'm no devil," said Methos. Snip, snip.

"I'm no saint."

"Not from lack of trying." Snip, snip. There, a ghost of a smile. "What lake is that?"

"Your lake. You tell me. You brought me here."

" _Eiswein_." Methos set his basket down and hooked his shears on its handle. "Saranac. It's upper lake Saranac, and you never came. You bloody, stiff-necked fool."

"Pick. We have to take them frozen to the press. The ice..."

"Is ice. To make _Eiswein_. In grapes frozen on the vine, water turns to ice, their essence separates and concentrates." He stepped up to his cold saint and touched his cheek with his twig fingers. "Into a sweet clot."

"No touching," said Darius, onto a bunch he held. Methos turned his face with his tingling fingers. Darius pushed him off. "No hands, no breath..."

"You never came. You left me for a champion, a warrior, an honorable man."

"You left me for a poet libertine. Which was the better bargain? Where is your poet now?"

"Where are you?" asked Methos, softly.

"Freezing my arse in the Adirondack, it seems. _Merci_ , Child."

" _De rien_ , Father. I didn't pick the season. I dreamed of fall."

"Of Adam's fall, that damned us all."

"Of a damned, canting, hypocrite of a priest.” He grabbed Darius by his rough smock and jerked him close, jostling a basket on the ground. He shook the unresisting body. “ _You ass! You wretched, murdered ass!_ " His throat closed; his mind clogged; for want of words he shook Darius again.

"Thou fool." Darius, stiff under his hands, looked at him from ice gray eyes.

"Thy fool." He bunched the rough smock tighter in his fists, against the cold. A fallen cluster of grapes crushed under his foot. Against the stinging cold, he closed his eyes. Against them, an afterimage, an outline in frozen white, blazed around a crimson core.

Darius pushed back, away. "No fault of yours."

"I was asleep,” he whispered through cold lips. The sun, or something red, burned his eyelids. His fists clutched rough, empty cloth. “I should have known."

"No fault of yours." A kiss on his cheek. A slap. "Thou fool. Wake up."

“I’m awake,” he whispered. “Now.”

A kiss on his closed eyes. A slap.

“Wake up,” said Byron. “Now.”

+++

“I’m awake,” said Methos, shaking his head. His eyes were dazzled, still. Red bled all around. His heart felt like ice.

“Now! Awake! Arise!” 

Something leafy lashed his face; he blinked his eyes open to rust and green, to sticky sap, to a cut in the tender corner of his mouth. He licked. It tasted bitter.

Byron stood in his hands, in his fists burning from fading cold. He clutched red wool and gold. A Turkish vest, knee length, over...over...gods. He knew this costume: the narrow, hairless chest, the soft belly, the ruddy, short cock beneath. The poet grinned at him. A wreath of laurel and ivy leaves was twisted in his hair. The snow was gone.

“Dozing on your feet, by God. You have a maiden’s gift for sloth.”

“And modesty.”

“Never a virtue, Doc. Never one of ours.” He laughed and batted Methos across the cheek again. It was another wreath, of grape leaves and berry bramble. The thorns scratched his nose, his forehead, as Byron wrestled it onto his head.

“Enough.” He stumbled backward over moss, barefoot. Bare legged. Bare... “I had socks,” Methos said. He wore a fine white shirt, an unlaced shirt, open at the neck and wrists, and nothing else. He hung free below its hem, exposed. He knew this costume, too. His mouth felt stained, his balls were damp. A ladybug lit on his cock.

“Stockings you had, filled with sulphur. I burned them and we danced in brimstone.”

“I doubt that very much.” Byron, the bastard, was in shoes. Moss covered the ground around them. Trees rose around the little clearing. They stood under a sapling canopy, a rough temple of wood and branches and bark. Sun, bright sun, lanced down through gaps in the interlace above. The air smelled of pollen and resin. It seemed summer, from the color of the leaves. The sky was flat and blue. “It’s hot,” he complained. He felt ill from the change.

“Never enough. Sex, song, and wine. And so to say...follow me.” Byron turned, but Methos was quicker. He hooked him by an elbow.

“No. We follow me, this time.” 

“This time?” The mocking grin remained. Byron stepped in, closer, nearly chest to chest. “No time. You follow, Doc; I lead.” He moved, quick as Methos, and grasped him by the balls. Loosely. Until Methos jerked back. His thumb pressed down, dividing the sac. “Is that not how we like it? Until you run away.” His fingers crept around, caressing. His mouth fastened on Methos’s neck.

It was hot, damp, and close. He could smell Byron’s hair; he could smell sap and blood. Byron’s cock pressed against his shirt and thigh. “No touching,” said Methos. Sap rising, blood rising, heat flowing up. Byron sucked his neck, noisily. Methos, with effort, pushed his hand off his cock and balls. Byron laughed into his neck and slapped his ass. “Come on!” crowed Byron. Methos shoved the middle of his chest, now slick with sweat as his own. Byron laughed and squeezed and wheeled away. “Bring the tools.” He limped to the nearest tree, where a leather sack hung next to a rifle and a knife on a belt. He pulled a bottle from the sack and waved it at Methos. “Come. I killed a stag. I’ve hunted; you butcher. We’ll feast.”

“I doubt that, as well. I’m neither lackey nor butcher.”

“Shall we call MacLeod?”

A black bee, a noxious bug, buzzed Methos’s eyes. He shook his head.

 _Wake up._  
  
“Shall we call your priest for benediction? For last rites? To sanctify the sacrifice and wine?”

“Wine’s holy enough,” said Methos. _MacLeod?_ “Is there truly a stag?”

Byron had uncorked the bottle. He drank from its neck. “Too sweet. A stag, a hunter. What’s a man but a stag, raging in the woods?” He drank again. He shook his hips, wagging his thickened cock. “Follow me, or run away. It’s what you do best, Doc. Follow or flee.”

Methos shook his head again. “Is this still Saranac? Where are we?”

“You brought me here. Your other Eden, your grand new land. To drink and hunt, to be lordly savages.” He pointed with the bottle. “And you ran away, as well. Before we skinned the buck.”

“It wasn’t a deer.” Methos’s head hurt. “I led, then, you followed.” He wanted water. He wanted wine. He closed his eyes. He wanted...

“Wake up,” said a familiar voice. “Wake up, Methos.”

He covered his eyes with his hands; the red became black. He didn’t want to see.

+++

He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to see. It was black, black, under his hands. His feet were cold, his chest burned, his heart was empty. If he couldn’t see, there was no outside there. If he couldn’t see, there was no season there. There was no present and no past.

No ghosts.

No clothes.

He imagined from the air a soft weight over his throat, his chest. A twenty-years’ graybeard, a growing, slow moving, snaking, curling mat covering him. His throat, his chest, his stomach. When it reached his genitals, it would fork, it would creep over and around and under him. His hair would never gray. This would be black, black hair, flowing to his naked feet. Cloaking hair. Clinging hair. In time, in endless sleep, dry, black, and withered to his essence.

He shuddered. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, his elbows tight against him. He could be on a slab. He could be under ice. He prayed...

“Wake up,” he whispered. "Wake up, you lazy devil."

+++

“Who's a lazy devil?" asked Duncan.

Methos shuddered. He turned his blind face to Duncan’s voice. To warmth. To a hand on his shoulder, settling a blanket. He cracked open an eye.

“Clothes,” he sighed. He shook a foot, finding the couch’s twiggy end. “And socks.”

“You kicked off your shoes, you lazy devil. You’ve slept the light away.”

Not quite. He could see the setting sun through the solarium windows, a sharp paring above a mountain crest and purple clouds above. The room was colder than before. Duncan had covered him. A maker, a man of tools. He grinned. His man of tools.

“Rip van Winkle, to the life.”

“But no beard!” Blanket, no beard, his hands verified. “No nagging wife, no musket.”

“No bowling sailors?” Duncan sat, crowding his knees. “The Catskills are thataway. You tossed enough. I couldn’t wake you.”

“You did fine,” said Methos. Duncan’s hand stroked his arm. Methos held it there. “Do I smell dinner?”

“A Brunswick stew. But something pleasant with dessert.”

“Ice wine,” said Methos. “From Darius.”

“Not unless it’s from your pack.” Duncan bent and kissed his lips.

“From me,” said Methos, and kissed him back. Sweet, he tasted sweet.

+++

**Author's Note:**

> Re-post. Written for Jay Tryfanstone in December 2009.


End file.
